CryptopiaFeeShares Hit Record Low Days Before $13 Million Heist

tl;drObviously an inside job; total amateur hour. They'll catch the thief but Cryptopia will never re-open; plebs like you and me will eat the loss all around.

New Zealand digital asset exchange Cryptopia halted operations on Jan 14, 2019 and put the online platform into "unplanned maintenance mode", later announcing on Twitter the exchange "suffered a security breach which resulted in significant losses."

Cryptopia has not released details of the "breach" nor the specifics of their "significant losses", but large sums of ether and ERC-20 tokens have moved from their known hot wallets since the site went offline. Most of the assets are currently consolidated in a single ether account.

Trading volume on the exchange's CEFS markets, Cryptopia's tokenized shareholder asset, inexplicably increased significantly in the days leading up to the theft, yet there had been no meaningful announcement, news, or rumor related to Cryptopia or its operations. The trading action was led by steady sell pressure and pushed the market price of CEFS to a record low of 0.0503 BTC and a USD all-time low of $178.62. The token is down over 50% since Dec 24, 2018, just three weeks ago.

Such unprecedented sell-off of CEFS just before the theft of several million dollars in tokens is not a coincidence, I assure you; it indicates the crime was an inside job involving at least one major shareholder. Obviously the thief was blind with greed, aiming to dump the shares before nabbing $13 million, leaving behind loads of evidence likely to lead investigators right to him.

The latest news from Cryptopia confirms they, too, see strong evidence of an insider operation – law enforcement and government agencies were quietly notified and promptly stormed the company's offices and declared the facility locked-down while staff were interviewed. Management clearly believed the thief was still there, and I'll wager they have a good idea who was involved based on the sloppy, amateur execution and the blatant trading activity taking place beforehand.

One last thought, though... why bother stealing de-listed shit-tokens with no market or means to liquidate? Like, what will they do with 400k StarCredits?

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We are engineers, scientists, and veteran crypto nerds. We have won and lost fortunes overnight; witnessed astonishing hacks and heists; studied preposterous scams and the mobs flocking to them; and unbelievable fraud so flagrant and shameless we questioned everything we thought we knew about everything. Observing such extreme behavior and how rapidly everything adjusts and adapts and intensifies in a an instantaneous, lawless, uncorruptable economy. It's a lot to think about.

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